FILM REVIEW

FILM REVIEW; When Corruption Comes In a Law-and-Order Guise

By A. O. SCOTT

Published: February 21, 2003

In real life, young police officers encounter all kinds of risks, but in the movies the greatest danger they face tends to come from older police officers, in particular those who serve as their partners, protectors and mentors. This is especially true if the veterans are part of an elite, special unit, elite and special being cop-movie synonyms for corrupt and vicious. Think, for example, of poor Ethan Hawke in ''Training Day,'' being menaced by the murderous caprices of Denzel Washington's garrulous, sociopathic senior detective.

If you have trouble remembering Mr. Hawke in that movie, it may be because the actors playing young police officers face grave risks of their own: they are in perpetual danger of being overshadowed by their older co-stars. Villainy, after all, offers better opportunities for an attention-grabbing performance than virtue. And in ''Dark Blue,'' Ron Shelton's melodrama of malfeasance in the Los Angeles Police Department (adapted from a James Ellroy story by David Ayer, who also wrote ''Training Day''), it is hard to know whom to feel sorrier for:

Bobby Keough, the junior detective, or Scott Speedman, the actor who plays him.

Keough is a dewy, pretty innocent ensnared in a web of tribalism and dishonesty. He is, through family connections, part of a seamy pocket of arrogant lawlessness within the L.A.P.D. -- a cabal of racist, brutal cops led by his uncle (an especially sly and louche Brendan Gleeson), who cloak their greedy vigilantism in the garb of law-and-order righteousness. Practicing an ugly, retail variant on the crime-prevention tactics explored in Steven Spielberg's ''Minority Report,'' they dispense beatings and executions without due process, reasoning that their victims were bad guys anyway and society is better off without them.

Keough's crisis of conscience is the movie's most obvious and least interesting narrative arc. The real center of the dramatic action is his partner, a strutting, shaggy-haired cowboy named Eldon Perry, played by Kurt Russell with the heat, precision and dexterity of a Duane Allman guitar solo.

Mr. Russell, as quick and resourceful as they come, has been throwing himself away for so long in barely watchable movies like ''Captain Ron'' and ''3,000 Miles to Graceland'' that his performance here comes as something of a revelation. Perry is nothing if not complicated, and for the character to work, we, like Keough, must be seduced and repelled by him in equal measure. Perry's soul has been corroded beyond repair -- by bigotry, by alcohol, by the poisonous traditions of the department subculture -- but he is kept going by a sense of honor that is only partly self-delusion.

Mr. Russell gives full rein to Perry's bold, profane swagger. Like Mr. Washington in ''Training Day,'' he savors the testosterone rush of street-level authority, but at the same time he shows that, underneath the bravado, the character is weary, sad and afraid. His marriage (to a Department of Corrections employee played, in too few scenes, by Lolita Davidovich) is falling apart, and his heroic, macho image of himself is crumbling in the face of unpalatable realities. Bold as it is, Mr. Russell's performance is also full of smart, revealing grace notes: look at the way Perry, after languishing in a motel room, shaggy and drunk, walks out into the sunlight clean-shaven and determined, in an alcoholic's last stab at maintaining the illusion of self-control; and notice the look of grim fatigue on his face as he prepares to walk into the film's climactic ambush.

Unfortunately, the rest of the movie, which opens today nationwide, does not live up to Mr. Russell's performance. The other characters are thinly drawn -- traced, really, from faded television-series blueprints -- and the baroque busyness of the plot is a poor substitute for complexity. Mr. Shelton has a loose, rambling style and tends to be more interested in character than story. But the script is overloaded with exposition and incident, and for long passages it shows all the verve and imagination of an episode of ''Hunter.''

Mr. Speedman, his hair in a grown-out surfer pompadour just like Mr. Russell's, looks as if he had gotten lost on his way to an episode of ''Felicity'' (in which he used to appear) and stumbled onto the set of ''The Shield.''

He is also burdened with an absurd romantic subplot conveniently arranged to tie up loose narrative strands. Keough is having an affair with Sgt. Beth Williamson (Michael Michele), who just happens to be the assistant and former lover of Arthur Holland (Ving Rhames), an African-American deputy police chief determined to bring down Perry and his crew.

Racial tension is a subject Mr. Shelton has addressed before, in sports comedies like ''White Men Can't Jump'' and ''The Great White Hype,'' directed by Reginald Hudlin from Mr. Shelton's screenplay. In ''Dark Blue,'' which takes place in 1992 as Los Angeles awaits the verdict in the Rodney King beating trial, racial hostility is as palpable as smog. The filmmakers, no doubt aided by Mr. Ellroy's knack for turning pulp narrative into a form of social history, produce a pungent sampling of multicultural criminality, in which cynicism is as basic a survival skill as violence.

The impending riot opens a dramatic wedge: the characters fear what might happen, while the audience knows the outcome. The threat of urban anarchy raises the level of suspense, and although its outbreak provides some of the film's most vivid and troubling scenes, the explosion produces a dramatic stalemate. The systemic rottenness that Perry and his gang represent and the simmering fury of the city's abused black residents should illuminate each other, but instead they cancel each other out.

Perry's big finale -- a thankless, speechifying scene that Mr. Russell brings off with remarkable aplomb -- feels curiously irrelevant, given what's happening in other parts of the city.

''Dark Blue''is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It has many scenes of violence, and the dialogue is a pungent stew of profanity and racial abuse.

DARK BLUE

Directed by Ron Shelton; written by David Ayer, based on a story by James Ellroy; director of photography, Barry Peterson; edited by Paul Seydor; music by Terence Blanchard; production designer, Dennis Washington; produced by Caldecot Chubb, David Blocker, James Jacks and Sean Daniel; released by United Artists and Intermedia Films. Running time: 118 minutes. This film is rated R.